The Three Brothers

Egyptian traditions recorded by Manetho and preserved
by Josephus contain some intriguing facts about Sethos and his contemporaries.
The heroes of the story are Sethosis and his two brothers Ramesses and
Harmais. Sethosis was the king of Egypt. His name is like that of king
Sethos who, according to Herodotus, went to war against Sennacherib.
The text, familiar to all who read Josephus, is as follows:

The last-named king [Sethosis], who possessed an army of
cavalry and a strong fleet, made his brother Harmais viceroy of Egypt
and coferred upon him all the royal prerogatives, except that he enjoined
upon him not to wear the diadem [and] not to wrong the queen . . .
He then departed on a campaign against Cyprus and Phoenicia, and later
against the Assyrians and the Medes . . . meanwhile, sometime after
his departure, Harmais, whom he had left in Egypt, unscrupulously
defied all his brothers injunctions. He violated the queen .
. . put on a diadem, and rose in revolt against his brother. . . .
Sethosis instantly returned to Pelusium and recovered his kingdom.(1)

This is the opening of the story as Josephus gleaned
it from Manetho. Manetho, in his Sethosis, amalgamated the Sethos mentioned
by Herodotus who went to war against the Assyrians under Sennacherib,
and Seti the Great, who two generations later fought against the Scythians,
Babylonians, and Medes as ally of Assyria, the subject of a later chapter
of this volume. Harmais is Haremhab of the monuments; his being a brother
of the king probably reflects the true situation. Like Sethos, he was
educated to be a priest.

The work of Josephus Flavius which contains the above-quoted
passage, Contra Apionem ("Against Apion ), a polemical
work of the first-century Jewish historian, was copied repeatedly by
hand; the earliest version that reached us dates from the eleventh century
and is called the Laurentinian manuscript, so named for
the monastery of St. Laurence where it was preserved; other extant versions
are but copies of the Laurentinian manuscript. In that earliest extant
manuscript of the work, where the story of the two brothers Sethos and
Harmais starts, there is an interpolation in the form of a marginal
note, worded as follows: In another copy was found this reading:
After him(2) Sethosis
and Ramesses, two brothers. The former [Sethosis] . . . slew Ramesses
and appointed Harmais, another of his brothers, viceroy of Egypt.

In Egypt, since ancient times, the royal succession was
supposed to follow the female linean heir to the throne usually
legitimized his claim by marrying a sister of his. The exhortation by
Sethosis when he left for the front, made to his brother Harmais, not
to wrong the queen and not to wear the diadem, we understand now is
but one exhortation. Taking over the supreme power in the country was
conditional on violating the queen, or marrying her while
she was still the wife of another.